The debate around AI being the greatest boon or the greatest threat to us is full on.

Have you been following the recent events at OpenAI? Most players in the industry are clearly determined to introduce Generative AI into all aspects of social and professional life as soon as possible, in order for us to reap the presumed benefits of a remarkable acceleration in progress. Whether the presumed benefits will manifest as such or not we don’t know. What we do know is that the Generative AI tsunami is coming and is unstoppable.

While it is the time to have a serious objective conversation about the true impact of Generative AI, as a CEO my priority is to ensure my company is ready to deal with what’s coming. Like me, many CEOs are much more worried about how they will be able to assimilate this coming change than about the actual benefits it will bring. While benefits are easy to assimilate, disruption is a real threat to business - therefore we need to “adapt” our company to the future looming on the horizon.

This time though, disruption will not touch only an aspect of the business, like robots for the old assembly line, or spreadsheets for the accounting process. This time the disruption will be including all aspects of a business as well as our personal life. It’s a pervasive disruption that we can already anticipate will bring an unprecedented amount of change. All this without us being able to predict the coming changes in the least.

How to prepare for the unknown in a situation of constant flux? The good news is that, as humans, we have been genetically built by mother nature to do exactly that: survive and thrive in situations of constant flux. Our human skills are the tools that since the Neocene humans have been relying upon not just to manage the unpredictable situations they faced, but also to thrive by taking advantage of any challenge as an opportunity to improve their lifestyle.

The industrial revolution of the 19th century began a process of trivialization of the human being which became simply the operator of a machine that was able to do a very specific task at a speed and with a quality that humans were unable to keep up with. That started a long and inexorable path toward emphasizing the machine vs. the human that was operating it. Yet success seems to prefer those companies that, more or less, consciously value and foster their workforce’s human skills.

Until now this was not a prerequisite for success. Now it is. The market, our economy, our society will experience an unprecedented rate of change that will, more than ever, require us to rely on our human skills. The only way to prepare for the unknown is to become extremely well-versed in the tools that will help us to cope with whatever situation we’ll face.

That’s what human skills are, the tools that nature has given us to cope with reality without knowing what the reality we’ll live in will look like. We have more or less disregarded soft skills for the past 180 years because, fundamentally, speed and efficiency was all that was needed from an assembly line. Speed, efficiency, or optimization are not enough anymore. Creativity, critical thinking and self-motivation are required to navigate the waters that are about to come. It’s time to claim back what makes us uniquely human, measure it, train it, and improve it because soft skills will be what makes humans indispensable in the workplace.